One-time oil baron, former prime minister and the woman once dubbed "the Goddess of the Revolution" by an adoring orange-clad crowd, Tymoshenko's Byut bloc defied pre-election predictions by securing a significant second place in the poll, amassing more than 20% of the fractured vote. Only Viktor Yanukovych's Regions party performed better than Tymoshenko's rank-and-file, but with just 30% of the poll . . . down 15% from the previous election . . .the party faces either coalition with Tymoshenko or isolation on the opposition benches. Meanwhile, Tymoshenko's former ally and co-architect of the Orange revolution, President Viktor Yushchenko, saw his party trail into third place in the poll. Still, coalition with the woman he once fired from cabinet could restore power to his Our Ukraine party.

Between the jigs and the reels, Tymoshenko's dance card is pretty full.

According to one Ukranian political commentator, the Iron Lady of the East is in a win-win situation. "She can either return as prime minister, accept a compromise post as parliament speaker or go into oppostion to criticise the mistakes of a government that would be deeply unpopular without her. Either move would be a good start for her presidential campaign." That position is already filled, of course, but for a woman for whom the term "blonde ambition" might have been coined, the only way is up.

She was born Yulia Grigyan in 1960 in Dnipropetrovsk, a Russian-speaking eastern city surrounded by Ukranian-speaking villages. An important arsenal of Soviet totalitarianism, the city was the power base of both Leonid Brezhnev and of Leonid Kuchma, president of Ukraine for a decade until he was succeeded by Viktor Yuschenko in 2004.

When Kuchma arrived in Kiev, he brought an influential Dnipropetrovsk contingent with him . . .amongst them, Pavlo Lazarenko, later prime minister and a close friend of Yulia Tymoshenko's.

Hers had been an unremarkable Soviet upbringing; after school, she went to Dnepropetrovsk State Univerity to study cybernetic engineering at the economics faculty (she later completed a masters degree in economics and has been a prolific academic writer);

while in college, she married fellow student Oleksandr Tymoshenko, the son of a mid-ranking Communist party bureaucrat; after graduation, she was assigned to work as an economy engineer at the machine-building plant in the city. At the end of the 1980s, the opening up of the old Soviet economies allowed the Tymoshenkos to set up their own business . . . a successful chain of video rental shops.

The collapse of the old regime coincided with a civic-minded entrepreneurial streak in Tymoshenko . . . she headed up a youth project in her home town while simultaneously working for a number of energy companies.

While Oleksandr accrued a significant fortune from exporting metals, his wife rose to head up her own oil company, United Energy System (UES). It made her first extremely wealthy and later, equally controversial. In the good old days, she ran four private jets and employed a whole platoon of ex-Soviet special-forces bodyguards. Much of her fortune came from taking advantage of an enterprise scheme set up by her old friend Lazarenko . . . the scheme would come back to haunt her but it also gave her an effective monopoly in energy production in the region and gifted her a significant launch pad for her political career.

By 1997, prime minister Lazarenko's business dealings were coming under scrutiny and UES fell under the gaze of the Revenue and Tax police and the Supreme Court of Arbitration. The company was fined more than $300m for currency legislation infringement: outraged, Tymoshenko announced her intention to fight state interference in corporate affairs by standing for parliamentary election.

As one of the wealthiest women in the former Soviet Union, she had been deeply unpopular with the rank-and-file voters; after her fall, she wore her indignation well enough to convince them she was both on and of their side. At the end of 1996, she was elected to parliament with a convincing 92% of the poll in the Kirovograd constituency.

She became deputy leader of the newly formed Gromada party, and two years later, took over the budget committee of the Ukrainian parliament. In 1999, she founded the Fatherland party and prime minister Yushchenko appointed her his deputy with special responsibility for energy. Her business dealings came to haunt her anew in 2001 when she was fired by Kuchma for allegedly forging documents and smuggling Russian gas during her time with UES. She spent a month in prison, but the charges were subsequently dropped.

Back on the beat, Tymoshenko was quick to convert her own woes into political capital. She claimed she'd been the victim of a presidential smear campaign, influenced by coal industry oligarchs threatened by her efforts to root out corruption. She further claimed that Kuchma had been involved in the murder of an investigative journalist, Georgi Gongadze. As a result of her agitation, the popular movement, Ukraine Without Kuchma, began to gather momentum.

The following year, when Tymoshenko was almost killed in a car accident, many amongst her supporters believed it was a state-sanctioned assassination attempt.

Her National Rescue Forum . . . an initiative to impeach Kuchma . . . was renamed Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc for the March 2002 elections, in which it secured 20 seats. In September of that year, she joined forces with Viktor Yuschenko and other political leaders to marshal a nationwide resistance movement against Kuchma. Two years later, that resistance was cemented into political clout when Tymoshenko and Yuschenko formed a coalition to support the latter during the presidential elections. When the results favoured Viktor Yanukovich, the allies cried foul and massive protests ensued. The so-called Orange Revolution forced the authorities to declare the election invalid. On 26 October, in a new poll, Yuschenko was elected president.

His nomination of Tymoshenko as prime minister was ratified by the parliament at the beginning of 2005. But her relationship with Yuschenko soured in the months that followed, and in September, he dismissed both prime minister and parliament, suggesting that Tymoshenko's tenure had led to an economic slowdown.

She has effectively been on the election trail ever since and increasingly, she has taken the Orange voters of 2004 with her.

Now, her former ally and later fiercest critic may regard the Goddess of the Revolution as his only real hope of retaining political power and controlling parliament. Equally, Yanukovych . . . regarded by many Ukrainians as the target of the Orange revolution . . . will be acutely aware that Tymoshenko offers him his best hope of popular favour.

For now, even without a victory in last weekend's poll, the glamorous . . . one campaign poster featured her in white leather straddling a motorbike . . . and fiercely ambitious "Joan of Arc of the Revolution" seems to hold all the cards.

The manner in which she chooses to play them is bound to offer a lesson to more faint-hearted politicians in how to window-dress personal promotion in the cloak of national interest. Watch and learn.

C.V.

Occupation: Politician
Born: 27 November, 1960; Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
Educated: Dnipropetrovsk State University
Married to: Oleksandr Tymoshenko, 1979; one daughter, Eugenia, born 1980
In the news: She holds the balance of power in Ukraine after last weekend's general election